FSA

After the Leadership Summit at Singapore, I have always connected myself closely with Mozilla’s Campus Campaign (CC) initiative – the idea to tap students’ potential to bring about a change in behavior, to bring about change in policy at a massive scale and finally innovate through the process.

Mozilla’s brainchild comes at a crucial time – especially with respect to India, where IIT alums are becoming Ministers of State and students from JNU are evoking tremendous change in mindset of the entire nation. Considering this as testament to the power of students on college campuses, I set about my own planning sprint for Mozilla’s Campus Campaign which aims to take back the web, in ways you can only imagine!

Kochi, 18th March 2016
This took quite some planning and a consolidated effort from Kumaresan, FSA E-board and me. The idea here was to update the regional community (Mozilla Kerala) at Kochi about what I learnt at the Leadership Summit, unveiling the curtains on the big Campus Campaign and finally formulate a plan of action! Although this seemed far-fetched when I initially kicked off, I am happy to say that I accomplished all the 3 goals I met for myself and more!

Since this was a community meetup, we (Kumaresan & I) made into an invite only event – so that people who have been a part of the community for quite some time were the only ones turning up. After setting up a form, soliciting responses and filtering – we finally came up with a shortlist of attendees. These people were then invited to join us at Cochin University’s Hacker Space – a student driven center for innovation on campus. (I’d love to have one of those on my campus).

On 18th March the day of the meet-up, I reached the venue early just to ensure that I don’t go lost wandering around the huge campus, and as I make my entrance – I find this!

CUSAT entrance

Yes, coincidentally the Arts Festival of Cochin University for 2016 was exactly on that very day! Talk about timing. Anyways, I had my work cut out for me at the Hacker Space. Since I reached well in advance – I was able to understand how the space worked, who is involved, etc from Shibin another amazing Mozillian from the community.

As the meet-up’s starting time neared, we had a slow trickle of community members and around 5 we had a full house of 25 people – our target! Yay. The audience was majorly FSAs (Firefox Student Ambassadors), with some participation from the Reps at Kochi. I first went on to introduce myself, tell them what I do and why I am there all the way from Bangalore – to talk about the CC in length and along with them, chalk out an amazing plan. I used my slide-deck on Mozilla inspired by Brian King to get the ball rolling, later talked about my own experience at the Leadership Summit and then moved on to pitch the CC.

Campus Campaign pitch

I talked specifically about the three goals as part of the campaign, specifically with reference to the Indian context.

Policy change

Behavior change

Technology & innovation

Later, we split into groups to discuss more on the tasks that would click in each college and when would be the best time to conduct it. Here’s Kumaresan taking the lead in one such group activity.

We re-grouped and shared our notes and it turns out mostly our thoughts were the same. I’ve listed them all out on the etherpad here! For those of you who don’t know – Mozilla Kerala is fragmented into 3 zones, the Trivandrum community, Kochi community and the Calicut community. After a rough estimate of 5 colleges per sub-community, we’d be looking at 15 active campuses during the campaign. Taking into the consideration the exam as well as holiday schedule at Kerala, this is a tentative timeline we’ve drawn up:

March end – finalize campuses

April second week – finalize 2-3 contacts in each campus

Through April – decide strategies & fix outcomes

April end & May – contact over e-mail (exams)

June second week – Campaign kick-off!

Post this, we had amazing burgers waiting for us and more importantly, 7up – that did a good job of quenching my thirst!

Personally, I think this was a very crucial meeting with the up-coming CC and some amount of restructuring is necessary and I believe I was able to drive the message across – about why taking back the web is necessary. And we will!

That’s right. After 2 and a half years of being in the Mozilla community, I had a chance to attend my first localization sprint. L10n has always been a distant non explored territory, maybe for the very reason that I stay in Bangalore – which is a tech hub of sorts and discussions here take you to what Python libraries you use or what’s the latest JavaScript framework over filter coffee, but not about how farmers in rural Karnataka are going to use the Firefox browser.

Fortunately, a couple of phone calls and some mails from Khaleel gave me an opportunity to check out what exactly goes into localizing great products into Indic languages. Of all the places in the world, this was about to take me to Pondicherry(a historical French settlement town along the Bay of Bengal coast) and I immediately said YES! I was supposedly invited to give a talk on Mozilla’s flagship FSA program and conduct a recruitment drive at Dr Pauls Engineering College in the area.

The moment I set foot in Pondy, the striking French influences struck a chord with me!

After a quick shower at a friend’s home I was ready to hit the road to reach our destination – Dr Pauls Engineering College. The efforts of the college’s dean needs a noteworthy mention, he was the sole reason we could organize an event there. Session took off to a great start with Adam briefing the 40 odd participants with fundamentals of open source software and its philosophy. The session was well received and a great effort, putting up this slideshow for the event, Adam!

This followed by our presence organizer Khaleel giving a talk and demo on how to get started with Pootle. He first described the importance of localization in a very creative and catchy manner that I’m sure struck a cord with all the participants there with me included! I made my very own Pootle account too! The mentor thus became a participant himself. Khaleel then gave a demo of how to get started with translating the strings. He gave specific emphasis about what to do and what not to do!

This was followed by a delicious and homely lunch organized by the college at their premises. After lunch, I started an ice-breaker to help everyone know each other better.
This is what I did –

Split everyone into 6 groups of 6-7 each

Introduce oneself to group members

Gave them a time slot of 5 minutes, within which they had to jot all the new words they learnt from the morning’s session

Whichever group has the highest number of buzz words, wins!

This activity helped the participants bond well with each other and it helped them activate their grey cells after a heavy lunch!

Breaking the ice!

We then moved on to the FSA slideshow, where I explained what one can do as a part of the program! This was followed by a open source overview and then a FSA recruitment activity where 40+ participants signed up as proud ambassadors of the open web!

The evening included a blissful hitch, discussion about life and philosophy with Khaleel and Vignesh – local FOSS enthusiasts. Beach was a welcome relief, after an intense discussion and a heavy heart, I bid goodbye to the lovely city of Pondy!

Until next time, Pondy! Ciao. <3

MozFace ON – Customary group pic

PS: @khaleeljageer and @AdamSwartz , you guys are doing amazing work in the region, please continue to do so! Pure respect. நன்றி தலைவா!

It all started with a casual conversation over a cup of chai about how amazing it would be if Mozilla could sponsor a hackathon in college. After 2 months of bug follow up and expert opinion thanks to Kaustav, we got Mozilla’s dev-rel team to agree to be an official sponsor for inGenius 2015. Simultaneously, I was in conversation with TJ and Biraj about the possibility to get all the RALs (Regional Ambassador Leads) of FSA (Firefox Student Ambassadors) program in India under one roof to catch up on what each community is doing and possibly transfer the learning to their counterparts. And yes, that was agreed to as well! So yes, it was all set and we had our amazing RALs Akshay and Karthic coming down from Hyderabad and Chennai respectively for the event.

At times, I do like the whole buzz of calling up people, matching their schedules, booking ttickets. The rush it gives me! xD

The day started off with us trying to get a table for ourselves and by the strike of 10, we were given our space, WiFi (most important) and a few chairs. Kudos inGenius! The Mozilla party consisted of FSAs from MVIT Mozillians led by their club lead Srushtika, another budding Firefox Club in the region apart from Kaustav, Akshay, Karthic and myself.

Mozilla contingent

In order to engage participants visiting the stall, we had set up a “Who’s there at inGenius” pin up board where participants could pin their Twitter handles! This was an interesting experiment and we had fun deciphering the various handwriting styles and analyzing different color of sticky notes. Kaustav even managed to group all the similar colored notes into clusters. 😛

Mozilla Pin up board

The organizers had also provided us a slot to talk about the Firefox Developer edition and FSA program. Kaustav introduced the crowd to the Firefox Developer edition while I highlighted the various aspects of FSA program and the impact it has on each ambassador – right from picking up essential skills to interacting with a good set of people all over the world.

Kaustav talking about Developer Edition

Abhiram talking about FSA

We had a chance to interact with over 200 participants out of which 75+ registered as FSAs, which is indeed an important takeaway as participants really want to be a part of this program and it feels good that we (Mozilla contingent) are trying to make that happen.

Getting busy at the Moz stall

FAQs

I’ve heard a lot about Mozilla, but don’t know how to contribute! Can you help me?
Sure, head to whatcanidoformozilla.org where you can choose your interests and select a project you’d like to work on.

Where can I register for the FSA program? What happens after I register?
Head to fsa.mozilla.org and fill out your details. This will be followed by a welcome mail which will have all the instructions you need to follow. These tasks will be about attending Mozilla events and how you share it with your peers.

How do I get recognized in the FSA program?
There’s a three-tier recognition process we follow, check them here.

I heard there’s a “Mozilla Phone”. What’s it all about?
There’s a mobile operating system called Firefox OS which is supported and developed by Mozillians all around the world. You can buy them in your own country, check this. The operating system is built using latest web technologies.

Can I pick up a Mozilla sticker?
Sure, go for it. 😀

The stall lasted till late into the evening and we were able to reach out to some of the organizers and professors present there as well. At the close, the RALs were glad to take a picture – first event where multiple RALs took part and shared their experiences.

Where magic gets planned – RALs

Personally this event was a great learning experience for me – to coordinate within various groups in the Mozilla community, reach out to interested people, plan schedules and pull off an event of this scale! I hope the contingent had a worthwhile time at inGenius.

When my community manager told me that we’re going ahead with a campaign to install Firefox on Windows 10 machines, I was like, “Whaat?” Being a total Linux convert myself, I’ve never even booted Windows on my machine for more than 18 months now. So, it didn’t make any sense at first. Later when I slowly read through the ideals laid down by FSF, one of the important aspects of `freedom` was to respect others’ choice of software.

So after a careful study, it came down to this philosophy,

We as torch-bearers of the open web, advocate the use of free and open source software but most of our counterparts use proprietary software and we cannot allow them to be told what to choose. Mozilla cares about our privacy, and the right to choice should always remain with the user.

Having set the above USP, I proceeded with chalking out a plan to host an event to not only make the #SwitchToFirefox, but to set a trend at it.

Take Back Control – Event poster

This was followed by discussions with TJ and Biraj to see if we can get some Mozilla goodies for the event and they obliged. Side note: The Firefox for Windows 10 campaign goes on till November, so feel free to check it out and if you’re inspired by it like me, don’t hesitate to host an event – at your school, coffee house or popular adda. 🙂

Although the shipment sent by TJ was weeks beforehand, it was routed to Chennai by mistake instead of Bangalore and I had to make a flurry of phone calls to finally get it here. And yes, it arrived on time. It landed exactly one day before the event, and we were just glad that it reached here. Thank you USP!

Basic agenda:

Club introduction and goals by Abhiram

Net neutrality debate by Abhinav

Privacy talk by Bhoomika

Firefox for Win 10 – customization by Sharath

Developer tools demo by Amjad

If you missed the event you can catch a sense of it on the event report penned down by all the speakers. However, what you will not get to see in the event report where we had an impromptu discussion by Sandesh, our club founder and Abinav – a very talented web developer. Sandesh talked about how one can protect one’s privacy on the internet as well as his contribution story.

For the photo-frenzy people, take a look at our Flickr stream by Alekhya. Thanks!! 🙂 The Facebook event page has also been properly documented, do take a look at it.
I had great fun hosting the first event of the year, it’s up to these guys now to take the baton forward, and I hope they will.